Scarsdale School District
Scarsdale is roughly 30 mins by train from New York City, that was founded in 1701 by the British. It is an affluent area (possibly the wealthiest suburb in the USA), with a very well supported and well-funded school. The school doesn’t receive Government funding, but receives funding through the local taxes. Many people move to Scarsdale for the duration of their children’s education to make use of the fantastic schools.
It is worth mentioning that the Scarsdale school district is very well resourced based on it being in such an affluent area. The amount of financial resources enables Scarsdale to investigate and implement innovative ideas as well as support them with the technology, however this doesn’t mean a less-resourced school cannot implement the same strategies.
We met with Jerry Crisci who is the Director of Technology at the Center for Innovation of the Scarsdale Schools District. The schools have a very strong focus on innovation, designing and making, learning through exploration and the integration and use of technology to solve problems.
With a strong desire to transform the teaching and learning, Jerry went to the board to request a budget for investigating and implementing innovative teaching ideas and to create a Center for Innovation. He was given $100,000 to do this and was advised “If some of your ideas don’t fail, then you are not pushing yourself hard enough”. This reiterates the idea that I previously mentioned, failure is seen as success. In fact I have now heard multiple times that failure is referred to as iteration, perhaps a term with less historical negativity and an implication that the process is not complete.
With the budget provided the school has had the chance to implement many innovative ideas as well as continue to develop others, along the way also finding a means to give back to the local and wider community; providing free newsletters and creating apps that can benefit others.
Together with Jerry we toured the high school, one of the elementary schools (there are 5) and middle school in the district. It was fantastic to see some the spaces. I would like to mention two of those.
Firstly, there was a work space in the library that had triangular desks on wheels and chairs on wheels. The idea behind this is that for students to be able to work together effectively, they need to be able to negotiate the space around them in order to form their own groups. Movable furniture (sometimes referred to as reconfigurable spaces)encourages and facilitates discussion. It is also important to mention that each student has is assigned a chromebook to support their learning for the year.
Secondly, the makerspace was brilliant and the staff allocated to it were just fantastic. The makerspace is a teeny tiny room that is choc-full of resources and inspirational posters. Students have access to cardboard, coloured paper, timber, metal, soldering irons, 3D printers, and electronics kits such as LittleBits, Makey Makey, Pico, Ototo, Hummingbird and loads more. The idea is for students to design for a purposeful audience, this improves engagement, attitude and outcome.
As it was the end of the school year we didn’t get the opportunity to see kids at work, but we did see at least one product constructed by a student, an interactive story book (similar to the idea we had seen at the Computer School but a more advanced product). There is huge importance placed on coming up with an idea, thinking it through and prototyping it before beginning development. We were able to see the prototype of the storybook, the finished book, the code and then I was able to interact with the book. It was very well done!
The makerspace not only allows students to explore solutions to problems, it also allows them to develop and refine thinking routines. In approaching a project they need to cycle through: looking closely, exploring complexity and finding opportunity. This process that can be applied to many aspects of life, and is a good, real world skill to develop.
Observation of the day
Many schools have teachers/staff whose role is technology integration. Not specifically the integration of technology into the classroom, but more focused on supporting a teacher to integrate technology into their teaching to benefit the learning of the student. Teachers aren’t left on their own to find technology resources and figure out how to use them. They are very well supported to whatever level they need and/or want.
In my own teaching experience I am always left to find my own ways of using technology, I need to trial them myself and I don’t feel supported in that, encouraged, but not supported. The idea of teachers being buddied with a technology integration staff member is fantastic, the tech integration person knows who has done what in which classroom, whether it has worked, different ways things can be done and so on. Letting each person figure things out for themselves is like reinventing the wheel, creating work where it is not necessary. Unsupported teachers don’t know how to make powerful use of tech to create and support meaningful learning experiences.
I feel that if teachers are unsupported with the tech, they are much less likely to be willing to use it – I suspect this is a contributing factor to the infrequent use of laptops in my school despite our 1:1 ratio of devices:students.
CatComputerTeacher 